Ari Wegner ACS / The Power of the Dog

British Cinematographer

“The Power of the Dog” – Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel examining masculinity from the perspective of a deeply homophobic, but closeted, rancher – has been adapted by director Jane Campion for Netflix and skilfully lensed by Ari Wegner ACS.

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The cattle castration mid-way through The Power of the Dog is a wince-inducing visual metaphor and another twist in a slow ratcheting of tension. The ropes that the cowboys lovingly plait from rawhide further signify the tightening of its psychodrama. DP Ari Wegner ACS says these macros are just as important as the film’s more obvious wild west vistas.

“The idea of giving love and attention to a macro was always in the architectural language of the film,” explains Wegner. “Those second unit ‘found details’ were things Jane and I had thought about when we storyboarded. They didn’t necessarily have a place yet. Some were conceived as chapter breaks or interludes, but we made a list of images that we thought had an emotional resonance beyond their beauty.”

Conventional Westerns have the characters roam outdoors. The Power of the Dog is set mostly in dark, gothic, and cavernous interiors straining against the pull of the wild outside. 

The images included shots of horse’s manes, hands on rope, fingers playing piano and banjo. “These details have something iconic about them and can say more about the story than any more obviously dramatic moment.”

Wegner tasked A Cam/Steadicam Grant Adam to grab the macros, working from a “huge” PDF list of specific landscapes she’d seen when scouting. “We’d itemised Google GPS pins, camera angles, and notes like ‘get this at 4pm, this at dawn, this with a long lens from right here,” she relates. “It was a huge amount of work, but Grant made it feel effortless.”

Adapting the novel

The Power of the Dog is Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel examining masculinity from the perspective of a deeply homophobic, but closeted, rancher. Jane Campion’s adaptation for Netflix stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

 

Perhaps because of their shared antipodean heritage (Australian to Campion’s Kiwi) but more likely having seen the DP’s work on True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), another subversion of western legend and examination of tragically toxic masculinity, the director invited Wegner on board.

“Jane wanted someone who could be available for months of prep. To me, that’s a dream. I am a sucker for preparation and will take any moment I can get with a director.”

Campion and producer Tanya Seghatchian had already scouted in Montana, setting for the novel, and concluded that that part of the world was now too built up to pass as the 1920s. The sparsely populated Hawkdun Ranges of New Zealand’s South Island were deemed a good match for frontier life.

“We spent a huge amount of time on that site in prep, getting to know the landscape and the building, understanding how the light worked and what the best times of day were. For some specific shots we needed to capture the shadows on the mountain. The exteriors were shot 99% with available light but because the days are so long and dusk and dawn so far apart, we had to commit to one or the other. Mostly we chose dusk… Jane is not a morning person either!”

Trapped in the open

Production designer Grant Major built the main ranch set, mostly exteriors but with one room for shooting interiors. “This was what we called the cowboy dining room and it allowed us to do shots such as Rose (Dunst) running outside and we can pan around and see how she feels trapped in the wide-open space,” Wegner says.

The film appears as a Western on the surface, but the genre was not a huge touchstone for the filmmakers. “When I think of a Western, I think of a man on a mission off to right some wrong or just travelling thorough the landscape on a quest and the story often ends in some big show of violence,” Wegner says.

“Violence does play a big role here as tension but mostly it’s a kind of invisible violence and the threat from within the house and the family structure. There’s the idea that someone closing a door or moving a chair could be just as terrifying as someone pulling out a gun.”

It’s not that they avoid westerns completely. The iconography of characters silhouetted in doorways framing the plain is straight out of John Ford. A tonal reference was the period contemporary photography of Evelyn Cameron; the colours were taken from the location’s wintry and muted summer hues and the minimalist palette of paintings by Lucien Freud and Andrew Newell Wyeth.

“The only exception was Rose’s costume which are bright or pink,” Wegner says. “As Rose is increasingly isolated, she takes solace in outfits to bolster her confidence.”

Conventional Westerns have the characters roam outdoors. This film is set mostly in dark, gothic, and cavernous interiors straining against the pull of the wild outside.

“One of the things that excited me was that dark interior contrasted with big bright exterior,” she says. “Coming from Australia, this feeling of being inside in middle of the summer is very familiar to me. The windows were designed to be huge in keeping with the architectural style but knowing we’d be shooting interiors in a studio (in Auckland) challenged how we would manage that. We explored green screen and blinds, even blowing out the windows. Ultimately, we settled on printed backdrops. It’s basic old school, just billboard-sized print out of photography we’d taken on location. It enabled us to select the time of day, bright or overcast, and light the set accordingly.”

HMI keys were augmented Source Four LEDs. Wegner also bounced moonlight off modelled glass. “To be in the same set day after day was a tremendous way of playing with the space, knowing how this wall reacts in this way and how we could incorporate different textures.”

The lack of a processing lab in NZ was the one downside to shooting in the country, although an Alexa Mini LF with Panavision Ultra Panatars was hardly a compromise.

“Jane likes to have the camera rolling and not feel the pressure of dollars clicking away,” she says. “We also didn’t want to draw attention to any aspect of the filmmaking. Sometimes anamorphic is too strong of a look but the 1.3x squeeze of the Ultra Panatars gave us beauty without ever screaming out at you.”

Campion’s decision to shoot aerials with a drone seems to run counter to this. “It surprised me that she wanted drone shots and I was a bit nervous of having big swooping moves, but the scale of the location’s geography definitely presented itself to be shown in this way. When we made other sweeping camera moves such as when it revolves around George (Plemmons) and Rosa dancing, there’s a specific emotional reason.

“Likewise, each drone shot had a narrative reason. It was never just an establishing shot, or a glory shot. For instance, the drone accelerates as cars carrying the governor arrive at the house and Rose’s anxiety rises. It’s her worst nightmare come true.”

 

The Metaverse is a 50/50 Mix of Technology and Storytelling. The Storytelling Part Counts.

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Chicken or egg? Will the metaverse become a dystopian nightmare as imagined by science fiction books and films or does our culture of dystopic sc-fi become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

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Movies, books, games, TV shows have a dual relationship with society: they are born out of a social context, but they can also influence society in return.

And when it comes to technological innovation, science fiction occupies a central role, so much that it has been defined as a “form of modern-day mythology” which significantly impacts how people think about and envision the future.

“Narratives are shaped by the world, as much as the world is shaped by narratives,” says Martina Mendola, a PhD in Contemporary Literature from Trinity College Dublin.  

She’s examined recent media coverage of the Metaverse, and finds Second Life, The Matrix, and Snow Crash “are the main (if not the sole) cultural sources to build a common understanding of the Metaverse.

“These are sources not only in the sense of being used as references, but they appear to be mental models of a world,” she says, “that has already begun being constructed, imagined and experienced through games, novels and movies.”

Right now, the Metaverse is composed 50% of technology and 50% of storytelling, she believes.

That sci-fi extrapolates from the present to depict a mirror of ourselves in the future is of course its very essence.

“The danger,” Mendola says, “is to be trapped into an ineluctable view of the Metaverse that is dystopian by design.”

Movies, games and novels alone cannot create behaviours, she acknowledges, but given enough time and exposure, “they can give birth to irrational fears and desires: beyond being escapist entertainment, they raise ethical, political and existential questions about the new technological world that become deeply entrenched into one’s worldview.”

The history of the sci-fi genre has mirrored the prevailing view of technology at the time. When technology arose to become a driving force for society change in the 17^th century it was closely connected to the idea of progress.

Francis Bacon’s novel New Atlantis (1626) for example presents a utopian community driven by scientists whose discoveries and inventions bring prosperity and happiness.

A century later, the industrial revolution revealed the social toll of the myth of progress and the failing utopia of the age of machines. Novels such as Frankenstein (1818), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Time Machine (1895) and The War of Worlds (1898) captured this embryonal fear that when the dark side of humanity met the dark side of technology, catastrophe would ensue.

The 1^st World War brought powerful anti-science fictions in the form of novels and movies (Metropolis, 1926; Brave New World, 1932) that explored the dangers of a blind technological progress.

Works such as Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) expressed the “technophobic fear of losing our human identity, our freedom, our values and our lives to machines.”

These ideas solidified with the arrival of the internet. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) presaged a “frightening near-future tales of cyberspace cowboys, weaponized cyborgs, underground genetic surgeons, and evil multinational corporations struck a deep cultural chord.”

Graphic novel Watchmen (1987) found human flaws in superheroes, not least threatening to use the atomic power of the bomb to wipe out humanity.

Cyberpunk grew to become one of the most powerful subcultures of the 1990s, writes Mendola. “In these dystopian views, the human body is turned into an interface, and the computers become the new brains, so that humans get trapped and manipulated in an inescapable technological cage, exemplified by The Matrix (1999).”

The academic wants to us to “critically interrogate the cyberspace mythology” informing our views of the Metaverse”, to understand how we can use it to consciously design our futures, while simultaneously “loosen the powerful grip of myths of the future on the present.”

Tech utopia is still present. It’s “rooted in the Silicon Valley culture of progress, disruption and innovation at all costs.”

If there is a danger in having big tech companies shaping their visions of the Metaverse, she argues, “there is also the danger of having science fiction informing our collective visions of what the Metaverse will be like.”

Mendola looks to author Margaret Atwood for an answer. Atwood has said she prefers the definition of speculative fiction, rather than dystopia.

“Her strategy is to push actual scenarios to their fictional extremes, to portray what could have happened. The it is what makes Atwood call her novels ustopias, a mix between dystopias and utopias: because despite the worst premises, the worst remained constrained to fiction.  

According to Atwood, every narrative has both utopian and dystopian elements within it, if we look closely enough.

Inspired by this, Mendola says we should all take sci-fi with a pinch of salt (as if we don’t anyway).

“We should … critically interrogate the material, instead of letting it dictate how we envision a future against which we evaluate present technology and its direction.”

 

Yeah, That “Vibe Shift” Quickly Shifted Again…

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It’s as if culture and global trend setters had been hibernating these past two years but our pandemic release has caused an ennui that no one can put their finger on.

There’s been a lot of chatter online describing this as a “vibe shift,” and vain attempts to pin down what this means.

The phrase comes from Sean Monahan, a trendcaster blogging at Substack. A trendcaster, or trend forecaster, is someone who has made a career of translating cultural trends for a larger audience. (Monahan also coined the term “normcore,” a fashion trend that embraces unpretentious, average-looking clothing as a way of subverting conventions about hipness, in the same way that “mumblecore” means cute, low budget, dialogue-heavy indie films like those made by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.)

Anyway, journalist Allison Davis picked and ran with Monahan’s idea and her piece for The Cut went viral.

She describes “vibe shift” as when, “In culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated,” and then worries whether she’s caught the new wave or is kind of condemned to miss out.

Like Monahan (who is 35), Davis is a self-described “geriatric millennial” who worries that she’s no longer young and hip enough.

“It’s chilling to realize you may be one of the stuck, or if you aren’t, you may be soon… I haven’t stopped thinking about my own survival odds since.”

Where Davis and Monahan are right is in identifying that the pandemic has hit pause on life, or at least put things into slo-mo.

“That while some of us were inside, or in the world but social distancing, or just keeping to ourselves as best we could, culture wasn’t really moving forward,” Davis says. “I didn’t feel acute FOMO. It was nice that everyone was sort of stagnant, watching the same trash on Netflix. Sure, some people were going out ‘secretly,’ but we didn’t really know what those people were up to, and we didn’t have reason to believe they were advancing any sort of scene.”

In other words, the pressure to dress just right and talk about just the right things has been taken off these past two years since the world just stayed in.

“There’s been a real paranoia that people have,” Monahan tells Davis in an interview. “Everyone coming out of hibernation being like, What are people wearing? What are people reading? What are people doing? And it was different than when everyone had gone into the pandemic. It unsettled a lot of people.”

Now the lid has been lifted, the masks are off, the party can resume. To some people — and what seems like the rest of the internet, including sites like Bloomberg — that’s nightmare enough. Everyone seems preoccupied with catching the new vibe — whether that’s wearing “American Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair and messy makeup,” according to Monahan — the return of early-aughts indie sleaze.

This is trite stuff at the best of times and to be completely fair to Monahan, Davis et al — they were writing all this in mid-February.

Remember mid-February, when the world seemed like just a normal kind of place where you could indulge in this kind of drivel?

Not any more. There is now something catastrophically deaf about these words from

“I suggest that the death drive has something to do with it. With the pandemic and climate change, our aesthetic and behavior are certainly shaped by a sense of doom. There’s a nihilism to the way people dress and party; our heels get higher the closer we inch to death,” Davis writes.

Mashable’s riff on the topic is equally insensitive, but only in light of the events that smashed the world overnight a couple of weeks later.

Yet, even though they didn’t mean it — because how could they — there is a vibe shift. At least one felt in Europe, perhaps less so thousands of kilometers away in North America — I’m not sure.

Russia’s war on Ukraine — on the whole of human rights and at the heart of democracy — changes everything.

As happened with COVID, the compulsive need to keep up with the Russian invasion is taking a toll on our mental health. The constant urge to check up on bad news is called “doom scrolling.”

Dr. Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist at Cardiff university, told The Guardian that the fact the crisis was still unfolding meant people were experiencing a kind of perpetual cliffhanger that made it harder to disengage.

“It would be great if you could just say, I don’t want to engage with this Ukraine situation, because it caused my anxiety to spike. But because of the way the world works now, you’re cutting yourself off. It’s a lose-lose scenario,” he says.

In the same article, Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity coach from London, says she’s been searching out personal testimonies on Twitter, trying to find different sources of information. “It’s the fact everything has happened so quickly. It’s not a question of what’s happening on a day-to-day basis, but hour by hour.”

She adds, “I’ve lost all inclination to socialize. It feels too trivial.”

Everything, including anyone losing sleep over which sneaker app to have open on a phone, is trivial in comparison.

The war cannot be contained; it is hard to compartmentalize, and it is so hard to ignore because the sides are so clearly drawn.

As Tomasz Jagiello, CEO at Polish cinema chain Helios Cinemas, told Celluloid Junkie last week, “Honestly, I forget about COVID and the weekly results of my cinemas or windows. I feel like we are witnessing a change in history. I don’t remember any moment where’s there been such a clear line between bad and good. That’s why we all united to support the good and we all admire the great Ukrainian nation.”

 

Behind the Look: Welcome to Earth

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From the ocean depths to the African plains via the edge of an active volcano and the perilous side of a glacier, Will Smith gets up close and personal with the living planet in the new natural history blockbuster Welcome to Earth. The National Geographic series on Disney+ takes blue-chip wildlife documentaries to another level. The six-part original series follows two-time Oscar nominee Smith on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to explore the world’s greatest wonders and reveal its most hidden secrets.

The series is executive produced by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, Protozoa Pictures, Jane Root’s Nutopia and Westbrook Studios. The scale of the orchestration required to capture the intimate and the spectacular on location was an enterprise closer to a large drama shoot in its scale and ambition.

“It would be very easy to make Will a presenter, but we wanted to give him the real experience and have him absolutely live that experience,” says BAFTA-winning director and Nutopia showrunner Graham Booth. “We didn’t want a performance. We wanted the true, flowing journey, not just a series of scenes with set lines to say. He’s reacting exactly as you would when faced with a huge shark, an extreme cliff edge, or a terrifying rapid.”

GROUNDBREAKING IN THE GENRE

Nutopia, Westbrook and Protozoa had previously made the National Geographic documentary One Strange Rock but this show couldn’t be more different.

“I would say it’s groundbreaking in the genre,” notes Booth. “It’s absolutely out of the ordinary. Obviously, he is a superstar, but this is not a celebrity vehicle. This is a genuinely profound and honest journey by Will into the natural world.”

Another alum of One Strange Rock was award-winning cinematographer Brendan McGinty. “It was unlike anything I’ve experienced on this scale,” he says. “We were joining two worlds, that of A-list Hollywood production logistics on one level with the speed and agility of documenting the real world.”

A key decision up front was how to marry these worlds into one consistent aesthetic. “We were determined to make this a realistic fly-on-the-wall journey, but wanted it to look like cinema too,” Booth says. “It’s very hard to create beautiful shots when you don’t know what will happen and you don’t want to stop the action. So, shooting 8K allowed us more flexibility to punch into the shots in the edit, and the RED camera always produces the most beautiful images.”

McGinty has previously chosen RED cameras as the right tool for the job, starting with shooting RED ONE for doc series River Monsters in 2010. Booth and Aronofsky knew that in signing McGinty, they would be getting a seasoned RED filmmaker.

“Graham and Darren knew my thinking was RED from the get-go,” he says.

 

MULTI-CAMERA DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING

Preparations for the shoot were extensive, and after a wealth of testing the decision was made to shoot on RED GEMINI S35 for the ‘documentary’ vignettes in the series and to shoot on the MONSTRO 8k VV for the extensive Smith ‘host’ sections.

“Since we’d be shooting close up to Will, I thought that the look and feel of the large-format frame combined with the landscapes would give us something audiences hadn’t seen before,” McGinty says.

“I’d used GEMINI before and know it has amazing latitude and low-light performance. The MONSTRO had only just been released and I was immediately impressed by its color fidelity. For color alone, it is one of the best sensors out there.

McGinty was the DP and main operator for all the host shoots across the series. “My role was always to be on the shoulder of Will, seeing the world through his eyes. Being on a large-format sensor gave us a mix of intimacy with Will combined with the majesty of the VistaVision sensor. We wanted everything to look as cinematic as possible.”

On every host shoot they’d run at least 10 camera bodies: five MONSTRO and five GEMINI across handheld, Steadicam, gimbal, and extreme telephotos. Drones and mini cameras augmented coverage. “There were loads of occasions we had single camera shoots but even with multicamera, we moved incredibly fast considering the amount of people on the ground. Our aspiration was always to keep the action continuous.”

The typical plan included an A and B cam, often handheld and sometimes on legs and sliders and a C cam pre-built into a gimbal and/or Steadicam gyro-stabilised in some way. In the Serengeti, REDs were on Flight Heads mounted on vehicles.

The team carried ample sets of primes, but often preferred Angénieux EZ zooms designed for full frame/ VV. “That allowed us so be super responsive. I’m going down a volcano with Will and I’d be on a 45-135mm F2.8/T3 on his shoulder. I can reframe and grab different options of what’s happening in an instant.”

Covering every eventuality required considerable orchestration on the ground. Like a major blockbuster the team would recce the location, rehearse and block allowing Smith the freedom to move how and where he wanted during the filming.for a truly epic backdrop for the journey.”

SHOOTING IN A VOLCANO

Shooting on the active volcano of Yasur in Vanuatu, presented the most arduous shooting conditions set within an explosively dramatic landscape.

“Inside the volcano, I’m shooting through thick clouds of colored gas with magma exploding and sun flare down the lens,” McGinty recalls. “The light was dropping and there was this moment where the glow of the magma is lighting Will and the explorer up as much as the blue ambient light of dusk. I hoped then it would all hold up.”

Fortunately, McGinty had the luxury of being able to check rushes that evening in company of a DIT/colorist who travelled with the crew and was able to perform grades on the fly. “It’s like the old days of shooting on a negative it’s just you’ve got this huge digital negative to draw on. The beautiful pink and yellow colors of the gases were still there, combined with the quality of the light and the glow of the magma gave this film such a distinctive photographic palate.”

8K RECORDING AND POST

Recording 8K on RED enabled scope for reframing and stabilization but there were overriding technical and aesthetic reasons for the resolution choice.

“Everyone imagines 8K is about sharpness but for me it’s quite the opposite,” McGinty says. “You can actually run with high resolution image which appears much softer to the human eye. We never wanted to see any augmented sharpness. That was our mantra in the grade. The 8K as captured by RED delivers a natural high resolution that comes very close to how humans experience the world.”

A 4K finish was required by National Geographic and the deliverable specs were more rigorous at Disney which acquired the natural history specialist during the show’s three-and-a-half-year production.

“Being able to hit 4K gracefully by having a bit of wiggle room in terms of resolution to stabilize is important, but a bigger deal for me is RAW recording,” McGinty says. “On a series like this when we’re shooting staggering amounts of data the fact, we can shoot compressed RAW was such an elegant way to work.

“There’s not another camera system that can really deliver pristine 8K RAW. RED delivers way more resolution and fantastic 16-bit color and more latitude in a smaller parcel than anyone else. I think it’s something RED got right a long time ago and for this series it was a no brainer.”

Preproduction tests confirmed that 7:1 was the sweet spot for compression. “We tested against all sorts of environments and felt that this was the right balance of data payload and compression,” McGinty explains. “We honestly felt that the human eye couldn’t see any finer detail beyond this, and it was well within everyone’s specifications.

“That was a great position to be in since, with certain camera systems, conversations about tech specs can be quite fraught as broadcasters become more conscious of future-proofing blue-chip assets like this for resale. It was clear to everyone involved here that we couldn’t deliver any higher standard.”

The host scenes alone totalled 120TB across series. Not that this volume was hard to wrangle.

“RED workflow is so integrated into every post house it has become second nature,” notes McGinty. “All I heard back from the production teams was nothing but celebration. They were blown away by what rushes looked like and that was coming from Graham and Darren and Disney and Will. Everyone felt it looked unlike anything seen before and a lot of that is down to the camera system.

“The delicate balance for Welcome to Earth was always to keep as much ‘cinematic’ value to the photography while staying true to the realism and energy of an epic journey. Throughout the series, the 8K VV sensor matched with full-frame zooms meant that even in our ‘roughest’ documentary moments there was always a certain cinematic grandeur to the photography.”

 

What Exactly Is Web3? It’s Greatest Appeal May Be That It’s Nothing and Everything

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Tech stocks may have taken a fall in recent weeks but that hasn’t stopped Silicon Valley obsessing with the tech bubble of Web3.

Web3 is a world-changing opportunity to make a better version of the internet and wrest it away from the capitalist monopolies who control it today.

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Or, it’s a purely speculative enterprise where some people will make a big chunk of change but most others will just lose.

Is it the future, a scam, or both? asks an article at Vox written by the aptly named Peter Kafka.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki recently declared that Web3 represented a “previously unimaginable opportunity to grow the connection between creators and their fans.”

A flurry of tech workers who are already very well compensated are leaving their current jobs at what we might call established web 2.0 companies — including YouTube — for something in Web3, as The New York Times reports.

The less hyperbolic Li Jin, one of the few prominent women talking about this technology, says Web3 “is intrinsically tied with financial value; “Anytime you introduce financial success, that’s what really incites strong emotion.”

Even when tech bubbles deflate, notes Kafka, you can still find value in the aftermath.

“At its core, Web3 is a rebranding of crypto and blockchain, the technology based around a worldwide network of computers that talk to each other and validate and record transactions without human intervention or centralized oversight,” he writes.

Another component is NFTs, either a groundbreaking means of transacting goods and services that breaks the bond of wage slaves to capitalist masters, or a fad that will die as soon as you invest in it.

“It’s entirely possible that this is all Web3 will be: an interesting way for people to collect and/or speculate on digital artifacts,” Kafka says. “That’s potentially meaningful for people who create art and people who like to buy art.. But if it stops there, it’s not world-changing.”

But with Web3, the argument goes, you take control back from the Facebooks of the world.

While this is largely theoretical, Kafka explains that this is by using blockchain, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and digital tokens.

“Blockchain lets people create their own money, without permission from any country or bank. It could also, Web 3 boosters say, let them build anything on the internet they want, without having to rely on existing platforms like Google or Facebook, or tools like Amazon’s AWS cloud computing services. And crucially, the new services could be owned, in part, by the people who built and use them.”

DAOs (“essentially internet collectives”) could enable digital entrepreneurs to start up and make their companies a success outside of the traps and restrictions of having to do so via big tech platforms.

DAOs are supposed “to help people organize themselves online and create organizations that could rival or replace existing companies like Facebook or Google. Automated blockchain tech is supposed to make it easy to divvy up ownership and decision-making power among members. You can get into a DAO by buying into it, or you can get equity based on work you’ve done for the group, or whatever.”

Jonathan Glick, an entrepreneur and investor is quoted as saying of DAOs: “It is a quantum leap improvement in the way to organize people around projects.”

Kafka doesn’t seem convinced. For a start, he points out the eco-damage of mining crypto currency: “It’s an irresponsible waste of energy in a world facing a dire climate crisis; some estimates peg yearly bitcoin electrical usage as the equivalent of a country the size of Sweden.”

An article in The Guardian reports on a Norwegian bitcoin mining company aiming to reverse fightback against those criticisms.

Another challenge is that Web3, at least in its current form, “is not even remotely user-friendly” in terms of the ease of downloading wallets, buying crypto and transacting with NFTs.

And because the very concept of Web3 rejects centralized control or management — right now, there’s very little in the way of consumer protection.

“Web 3 fans argue that you don’t need government agencies or megaplatforms protecting you and your assets because their system of linked computers creates a ‘trustless’ economy,” says Kafka. “Since every transaction is recorded in public and verified by the blockchain, you’re not supposed to need the oversight of Big Government or Big Companies. In reality, Web3 has plenty of ineptitude, costly bugs, and outright scams, like intriguing projects that disappear as soon as the organizers collect your money.”

In the charming crypto lingo, situations like this mean you’ve been “rugged” — you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you.

Kafka wisely suggests that Web3’s current appeal is because it is so new and vague — the possibilities are endless, to be shaped, and mostly theoretical.

The utopian outcome of a metaverse which can be shaped to be noticeable different to the societal ills of the real world also get short shrift. Won’t we simply port the toxicity of human relationships wherever we go?

“Many Web3 folks are completely anonymous — its early user base and supporters certainly seem to skew as male as traditional tech does today,” he observes.

Meanwhile, what’s so good about owning your digital assets on the internet anyway?

“I don’t want to have to engage in a transaction every time I do something on the internet. And I don’t necessarily want to own the platforms and services I use on the internet. In the Web3 world, the power of the platforms to de-platform is something to fear. In my world, it’s the difference between trusting your security at a club to a bouncer versus a mosh pit.”

Kafka ends, “I’m convinced that a lot of people who are piling into NFTs and lots of other get-rich-quick pitches are going to get burned because that’s what happens to most people who go for get-rich-quick pitches.”

 

Distributed Intelligence: How 6G Would Work for the Metaverse

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Cellular technology evolution across multiple generations has consistently sustained global economic growth — and 6G won’t be an exception, according to InterDigital.

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The R&D house, which owns patents in 4G and 5G mobile communications standards, is busy staking claims for the next evolution, 6G, which could begin being rolled out by the end of the decade.

“Now that 5G commercial launches are rolling out, targeting both consumer and enterprise applications, the industry is already preparing itself for 6G, the next generation of telecommunications networks,” InterDigital outlines in a white paper, “6G: The Network of Technology Convergence,” co-authored by ABI Research.

The paper is an attempt to frame the use case for 6G and, presumably, to encourage investment in its development by states and telco communications providers.

It is envisioning 6G as a platform able to accommodate innovations coming from multiple disciplines, including connectivity, computing, AI, sensor networks, and virtualization.

One plank of the 6G platform will feature AI and computing as integral parts to network architecture, not just add-on optional features.

To put this into a context, InterDigital states that only 1% of data generated by connected humans, apps, and machines are processed, analyzed, and used today to make better and informed decisions.

“There is a huge opportunity to refine and extract information from every single data point generated in the process in a trustworthy manner. This is where 6G will be useful. 6G will be the key enabler for massive data processing compared to 4G and 5G.”

Implementing AI as a native function of the network will enable 6G to become the first-generation network to promote large-scale deployment of self-optimized and automated networks.

 There are clues to how this will be implemented in plans for 5G releases. For example, device-to-device (D2D) communications (called sidelink enhancements) specified under 5G Release 18 and above, lead to improved “accuracy, power efficiency, and integrity” of positioning used for Simultaneous Location and Mapping (SLAM) applications.

These sidelink specifications will continue to evolve under 6G to enable devices “to establish their own ad hoc network and communicate with devices belonging to that network without using public radio access resources as an intermediary.”

Under 6G, the full D2D communications capabilities will “enable a massive amount of traffic to be offloaded as devices can communicate directly and share data with other devices in their proximity without the need for public network intermediation. Not only this, but D2D will enable proximity services to be offered with premium quality in line with their expected ultra-reliability and low latency requirements.”

It is this “distributed intelligence” that will enable information to be delivered between machines, infrastructures, and virtual objects in real time, more reliably, and in a safer way, InterDigital believes.

In turn, this will supercharge the immersive real-time nature of our online experiences. In short, 6G delivers on the vision of the metaverse.

“6G promises to blur the boundaries between the virtual and real spaces,” the white paper forecasts. “The technology will enable the extension of the end-user experience beyond physical reality. Under this vision, users will be able to visualize, monitor, operate, or even simulate the reality of physical objects in a digital world without any physical constraints.”

InterDigital talks primarily about applications outside of Media & Entertainment. Greater GDP gains will be derived from simulating real-world solutions powered by 6G since, for example, this will lead to more accurate results and lower hardware repair costs by predicting maintenance needs and scheduling. Simulations could also lower the cost of new projects by eliminating the need for unwanted physical trials and proof-of-concept designs, the company writes.

“The realization of the metaverse will rely on a widespread deployment of interconnected sensory networks, including cameras, photodiodes, inertial sensors, time-of-flight sensors, ambient sensors, and biometric sensors.”

Further, 6G will come with a huge capacity — up to one TBps per base-station — ultra-low latency below one millisecond, reliability up to ten times “for certain mission critical services,” and dynamic slicing.

The network should be able to accommodate the requirements of different device types, from simple sensors to smart devices, and different application types belonging to either the physical or the virtual domains.

However, for this vision to materialize, a significant number of new innovations need to take place in the domains of security, end to end orchestration and automation among others.

Moreover, the 6G supply chain needs to retain its global status and remain free of geopolitical influences to allow 6G to accelerate and create a critical mass of enterprise use cases,” InterDigital warns.

It also urges telecom operators and content providers to align towards 5G and 6G network capabilities. This, InterDigital says, “will further illustrate the capabilities of 6G, and by the time the 6G standard is ready, the market will have matured for several use cases to be commercialized.”

 

How the Words ‘Content’ and ‘Creator’ Completely Lost Their Meaning

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More than 50 million people worldwide now consider themselves content creators, a term that is at best utilitarian and arguably lazy, or even disingenuous.

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Rebecca Jennings is right when she attacks the phrase in Vox. “Why not ‘comedian’ or ‘competitive dancer’ or ‘aspiring actor?’” she asks. “Didn’t that sound more exciting than two of the most meaningless words in existence: ‘content’ and ‘creator?’”

This is the future of work, according to some. “No matter which industry you’re in, people are all going to be creators,” Li Jin, an analyst covering the creator economy, told The Information. “All of us will have to adopt some of the skill sets and behaviors of creators in order to be successful.”

Yet when content creator could mean anyone from Steven Spielberg to MrBeast (YouTube’s highest earner, who made $54 million in 2021) to a porn actor on Onlyfans as well as some nut from QAnon, the term needs unpacking.

“There are creators who exist to educate the public on deeply important topics and manage to do so in a nuanced, meaningful way,” says Jennings. “There are also creators who spout hatred, racism, and bigotry, but are creators nonetheless.”

She contrasts the term with that of “startup” which sprang up in the 1990s to describe the phenomenon of young people building internet companies in their own homes (or garages).

Jellysmack VP Hugo Amsellem suggested in a 2020 newsletter that whereas “startup” described an organization in search of a scalable business model, a creator is someone who “scales without permission.”

“Creators are less judged on their talent or passion and more on how good they are at being themselves,” Amsellem wrote. “Essentially, they’re one-person media empires, whatever medium that may be.”

It was in fact YouTube which adopted the term “creator” a decade ago to describe the users that made up the platform a decade ago. That gave all user generated content “creators” on its site an attractive badge in a way that “gig” or “freelance” or “temp” or anything else isn’t, Jennings says.

“And yet the only reason we use the term to describe this segment of workers is that one of the biggest companies in the world designed it that way.”

And that being the case, it disguises the treadwheel of online existence for all but a handful of actual “stars” and “influencers.”

“Everyone wants the job because it’s creative, freeing, not a 9-to-5. But ever since going full time [as a content creator], I realize I traded my 9-to-5 to work 24/7 instead,” explained Joshua Holmes, a TikToker with 1.5 million followers, in a recent video.

“Not a second goes by that I’m not thinking about creating content. Every day I ask myself, did I really choose freedom, or just a fancier cage? But at the same time, isn’t the fancier cage better than the regular one? Yeah, probably.”

And therein lies the reason why millions of people identify as creators. There’s the promise of earning a better living and doing so under your own steam. Jennings realizes that she’s fighting a losing battle to change perceptions about what the terms creator means. The kids have already voted.

“Isn’t it more elegant, after all, to call yourself a ‘creator’ as opposed to ‘part-time barista, part-time Uber driver, and part-time Instagram influencer,’ even if the latter might be more accurate?” she asks. “Young people already know this. Whenever I quote them in a story, I’ll ask how they’d like to be identified: high school student? Swim instructor? ‘No, “content creator.”’ Perhaps we all will, too, someday.”